I Don't Speak German, Episode 14: The Red Pill and YouTube
This week, Jack returns and Daniel tells him all about the infamous Red Pill and YouTube as a pipeline into right-wing extremism. A wide-ranging chat that gets into issues like platforming, debating the right, etc. Warnings apply, as ever. * Show Notes: Austrian authorities raid far-right group over alleged links to Christchurch shooter Kushner, Inc White Nationalists Adopt Clowns as Their Next Racist Symbol The Matrix, Red Pill or Blue Pill 2 Dads TV: Take Back Our Future Faraday Speaks: My Descent into the Alt-Right Pipeline YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes Trainswreckstv debate, Destiny, Nick Fuentes, Hasanabi, Sargon of Akkad Welcome to Youtube "Bloodsports." Sargon of Akkad Can't Read (Sean video) Sargon's Petition: A Measured Response (Hbomberguy video) The Red Pill is a CULT (NonCompete video) The Red Pill: The Strange Art of Men's Rights Activism, Part1, Part 2 (Big Joel video)
Welcome to episode 14 now of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I, Jack Graham, talk to my buddy Daniel Harper about what he learned from more than two years of listening to the American far right, and the rest of them, talk to each other in their online safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc, etc, etc.
And as I say, it's episode 14 and I'm back.
Daniel's handed me back the hosting reins.
God knows why.
And so, yeah, you're going to have to put up with me again, I'm afraid, this week after having such an interesting guest last week.
And yeah, Daniel, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Episode 14, I mean, I felt bad about giving Samantha episode 13, but then you're coming back for 14, which is obviously, given the subject matter, an auspicious number.
Indeed, yeah.
Wait till we get to episode 88.
If we get that far, that's kind of the question.
You know, when The Daily Show got to episode 14, they actually did episode 14.881 with a Roman numeral, and then 2, 3, 4.
And I think they went to somewhere in the teens before they just decided to give up with it because their audience was really sick of the joke.
The original, I don't know, I think the original plan was to do episode 14 all the way up to 14.88, or 14.88 episode 88 in Roman numerals, but that would have been, at the time they were doing only one episode a week, so that would have been like a year and a half of just episode 14 variants.
This should tell you a lot about the level of humor that this community provides.
Yeah, it does rather.
I mean, I was getting bored just listening to you tell me about it, let alone... What I'm saying is we should do that.
Just have episode 14.
They should all be episode 14 from here on in.
Okay, right.
We should learn from our intellectual betters, ultimately.
That's right, yeah.
We should allow ourselves to be mentored by the... By Mike Enoch and the wonderful people over at the Daily Show.
The vanguard of the Master Race.
The very tedious podcasting network.
Ah, pun.
Anyway, that's over now.
That's over now.
Old banter.
The bit is over.
Yes, so welcome to the first of many episode 14s and we're a bit of tidying up housekeeping, as Sam Harris would say, to do before we get on to the main topic this week.
We wanted to chat a little bit about the connection between the Christchurch murderer and Generation Identity, didn't we?
Yeah, just a bit.
Just because I think there were some misconceptions around that.
I did get some people messaging me.
Oh, and I should mention this just before we kind of get into this.
Since the Christchurch Massacre, I have gotten a ton of messages.
I have gotten several people kind of joining my Patreon, etc.
I thank all of you for your messages and for your dollar a month or whatever you're giving me.
That is wonderful.
I am very busy with responding to all of this, and so I don't always get a chance to respond right away.
Please, that is not because I do not thank you and respect you.
It's just on the... I've just got kind of a lot going on, and I also have a day job in addition to this.
So, again, just want to let you know, if you've sent me something and you think I might have missed it, send it again, and I will start putting an email address In my Twitter profile because I have gotten some people who are not on Twitter who want to message me and don't know how to do that.
So I'll make sure... I did open up my messaging, etc.
and I will put an email address in my Twitter header so you can get to me that way.
Anyway!
So I did get a message from a couple of people who sent me this link, because I do get people sending me links, which is delightful, but usually I've seen it already, regarding this story of this Generation Identity, this financial connection between Generation Identity and the Britain Tarrant, the Christchurch massacre, the Christchurch murder.
I think maybe it's just sort of the way the headlines are written or maybe it's just because of the sort of breathless coverage or, you know, just sort of misconceptions.
I think a lot of people think that the money was going one way and the money was going the other way.
A lot of people think that the, like, they uncovered links that prove that the Generation Identity was feeding money into the Christchurch murderer, which would be uniquely awful and would be, like, not unexpected on my end, necessarily, except that's not actually what's happening.
What happened was the, uh, Britain Tehran was giving money to this group, uh, Generation Identity in Austria, and in fact this guy, Martin Sellner, um, head of the Identitarian Movement of Austria, Uh, who said on social media, I've got a link in the show notes here to The Guardian, said on social media that police searched his apartment Monday and seized electronic devices after he received a disproportionally high donation from a person named Tarrant, the same surname as the suspected Christchurch shooter.
So, uh, this ends up being about 1,500 Euros, which I believe is about $1,700 in current exchange rates.
Um, this is not like a $20 donation or something, this is a fairly significant amount of money.
Um, at least I've never given 1,500 Euros to any organization.
And so I think that that does kind of justify some of this but of course The people on the far right are definitely whining about this and saying like oh who you can't control who gives them money, etc, etc This is an investigation.
People are kind of trying to determine what connections there might have been we can agree or disagree about various like hate speech hate speech laws in Austria and And not kind of jump to conclusions about this is you know some kind of like authoritarian police state policing speech or whatever Anyway, so that's what's going on with that Yeah, it's true.
You can't control who gives you money, but you can control who you appeal to, can't you?
I mean, I have some very lovely patrons who give me money on Patreon.
If any of them, I mean, you know, I'm not saying don't give me large amounts of money, please, by all means do, but if any of them gave me a very large amount of money and then went and committed a massacre, I would Definitely examine myself you know I'm trying to imagine like if someone gave me $1500 and then wouldn't shut up like a group that I really like actively hate like focus on the family or some like anti abortion group or some anti trans group.
I wouldn't give that $1,500 to that group, but I would certainly donate it to some non-partisan charity of some kind, or do something with it.
I would at least feel bad about it.
But Seltner is definitely not feeling that way.
He was supposed to come to the United States and be married to Brittany Pettibone, who has several hundred thousand Twitter followers and is an overt white nationalist, although she pretends she's not.
And he couldn't get into the country and then it became a talking point on the far right basically saying like, oh, you know, you can control immigration when it's like some, you know, person, some white person doing their free speech thing, but not when it's like horrible migrants coming in to commit horrible crimes.
Gotcha.
That's always the rhetoric they give whenever one of these right-wing chuds is not allowed into a country for whatever reason.
We will be talking about that next week.
I will reveal that topic shortly.
Martin Sellner, you're a right-wing shithead.
You are a racist xenophobe.
And I'm sorry that you didn't get to get married the way you wanted to, but also I really don't care.
I'm really happy you didn't get to enter my country.
Although I don't wish you on Austria either, so... No, this is it.
You think Austria might have...
Learned better by now, but apparently not.
You think maybe, you know, little men in Austria talking about excluding people, they might have learned their lesson, right?
And they exported the last one, maybe that was their goal.
You know, it's like, export this one as well.
Yeah, just unload this one on to somebody else as well.
They seem to do that.
They seem to produce an awful lot of toxic people and then send them to us, whether it's Britain or America, which is great.
Thanks, Austria.
No, I mean, Austria is no better or worse than anywhere else.
I'm only joking.
Add to our mediocre whiskey meme, we should definitely add in an Austria-bashing meme, you know?
Okay, okay.
Yeah, my bit of my alibi there was completely insincere.
I do mean it.
Austria, there's something wrong there.
It's a terrible place.
Yeah, so at the very least, you know, a bit of a pause and a process of self-examination, but no, just straight into defensive mode.
Oh, it's not my fault.
How dare you criticize me?
How dare you imply Yeah, great.
Well done.
Really shows you're morally serious there.
Well done.
So, yeah, there was something else we wanted to talk about before we get a couple of other things we wanted to talk about before we get on to the main topic, which was.
Yeah, this this book, Kushner, Inc., which is kind of a deep dive on the Kushner family's financial dealings and all the financial crimes that they've committed.
I haven't read this book.
I don't plan on reading the book.
From what I've seen, it seems to be, you know, pretty well researched.
I mean, it's kind of one of those like current event books that kind of tells you what ultimately you already know.
But it's nice having someone document it, which is that like billionaires are ultimately cheating their way and exploiting people and doing terrible, terrible things.
They're against even the completely lax laws that prevent them from doing really terrible things.
I'm shocked.
What amused me about this is, so I was listening to Facts of the Nation this week, as I do every week, and this is the We're recording this on the 6th of, uh, or what's today?
I don't even know what today is.
The 7th.
So we're recording this on the 7th of April.
Um, so I'm not record- I haven't listened to today's episode yet, but I listened to last week's episode.
Um, because they do release their weekly episode on Sundays, and I usually don't have a chance to listen to it before we do our recording.
Um, but, uh, I was talking about how Fastination had, like, kinda completely given up on the Trump train, and they were, um, Just, you know, that they were, you know, kind of hitching their train to other wagons.
Yeah, they're getting Yang curious.
Well, they were getting Yang curious, although they weren't really quite going full-on Yang yet.
What's interesting here is that for the entire time I've been listening to Fashion of the Nation, they have A, been very down on the Mueller probe, which I think we can have a conversation about the Mueller probe, although none of us have seen what's actually in it yet, or in the final report yet.
I think there's interesting stuff there, but really not on topic for this podcast.
But they have been very down on that, but also they have had no conversation at all about the sort of like overall level of criminality that the Trump Organization just sort of exudes from like any Examination by anyone with fucking eyes?
Sweats from every pore.
They just don't mention it at all except for when, you know, like the lawyer, you know, Richard Cohen, and like, oh, Cohen, obviously, he's someone who's doing terrible things.
So any Jewish person in the Trump orbit is obviously guilty, whereas any Gentile or, you know, any non-Jewish person, any white person, quote-unquote white person by their standard, really doesn't get an examination at all.
They're going over this Kushtar book, and they do what they call a... They do a deep dive, but they... Again, I just want to, like, share the meme here.
So many of the TRS memes are mispronunciation of words, and so they do... They pronounce it as if it has, like, an N before the D, so it's like, n-d-deep dive, right?
Which is, uh, supposed to be kind of a pun on...
Kind of a verbal pun, an audio pun on Jazzhands McFeels' own accent, I think, or just kind of like being a spergy nerd or whatever, anyway.
So if you see, like, written out in text this, like, deep dive with Ns, one N before the two Ds, that's a reference to Vash the Nation.
Just letting you know.
Worth knowing if you see that in a forum somewhere.
Anyway, so they do a deep dive where they're covering this book.
They spent like an hour and a half Disgusting this book and apparently that did another hour and a half on this week's episode I'm really excited to listen to even more terrible things that the Kushner clan did Interpreted through the lens of outright genocidal fascists That's a joke Yeah, I got it.
So not only are they talking about this book and they're kind of chortling over the crimes of the Kushner family, which are like legitimately awful crimes.
I'm not defending the Kushners here, but suddenly they're now going like, oh yeah, the Kushner clan, they were cheating on their taxes and they were like kind of getting the building commissioners to give them special deals, you know, just like some other family we know.
And they started like just throwing in references to Trump's criminality at random.
As if, like, they've been doing this the whole time.
And I thought that was really delightful.
Like, yeah, no, I'm with you.
I wish you'd been doing this for the last couple of years.
Maybe you and I could get along just a little bit better.
No, we couldn't.
But it was definitely worth noting on this podcast that everything that I said on that episode is even more true today.
So that's always delightful for me.
That is nice, isn't it, when that happens.
Yeah, when they just sort of like, when everything that I say they just sort of like double down on my own talking points.
I think they're listening and leaning in to what I have to say.
I think that's what's happening.
It sounds like it, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
OK, so in other topical news, just in time for the new Joker trailer, apparently they're now switching from frogs to clowns.
Is this right?
Have I heard this right?
Yeah, so Clown World is a meme that's kind of been going around.
I mean, it was kind of a TRS meme like a year and a half ago.
Um, and, uh, this sort of, like, comes from this idea that, uh, any quote-unquote real country would be able to, um, just sort of commit atrocities against, uh, you know, people who are not the founding stock, and would, it would just sort of make authoritarian moves.
That's just sort of the natural course, and the fact that we don't do that is just a sign that, uh, you know, we're just sort of ruled by clowns, that we're just sort of like, it's just sort of not a serious country, and we might as well be having a Rubber nose on the end of our, you know, rubber nose on the end of our face, you know.
So, you know, the fact that we don't just, you know, actively deport brown people from this country because, like, they are, quote unquote, statistically more likely to commit crimes under bullshit statistical regimes.
But, you know, like, like the fact that we don't just machine gun down migrants as they're coming in.
The fact that we don't treat, you know, that we don't, like, treat criminals by cutting their hands off, etc, etc.
Um, all of these things are the sign that, like, this is basically just a clown country.
And so, like, this, like, clown world, uh, meme is just sort of, like, a meta-meme.
It just sort of kind of goes along.
Um, it kind of went away for a while, but it's, it's sort of being, um, increasingly, uh, adopted by, uh, kind of the far-right, certain kind of far-right YouTube channels.
Which we're not going to get into in detail, like exactly which ones these are today, but we're going to kind of cover that sometime in the near future.
In a future episode 14.
In a future episode 14.
You know, one of the many episode 14s we have coming up.
But no, I literally listened to a podcast episode this week.
Where, um, they played a speech by Mike Pence talking about, um, the special relationship, quote-unquote, that the US has with Israel, quote-unquote.
And, uh, they just played, like, a clown car honking noise, like, honk honk honk honk.
Through the speech.
So like 15 minutes of listening to Mike Pence talk, and I listen at 2.08x speed, and then occasionally they would giggle and then just play clown honk noises.
This is the level of juvenilia that I push through with you guys.
Wow.
Yeah, the clown.
Brilliant.
It's clownish.
It's clownish, you see.
This is the level to which this group, like at least the daily show, they would mention vaguely intellectual things and go off in a direction where at least there's something there.
The inheritors of that mantle are just playing hot noises over footage of some other thing, some other person talking.
It's delightful.
Anyway, so clowns!
Swifty and satire.
It's gonna be a thing.
Yeah, so watch out for clowns.
Expect the new Joker movie to be memed to hell and back.
Oh god, yeah.
That's gonna be lots of fodder.
Okay, so one more thing I will mention.
I did forget to justify this.
At the end of the Christchurch episode, I did predict that we were going to see more attacks like the Christchurch shooting, and I didn't really justify that as clearly as I wanted to.
The justification there is that as As these guys lose faith in the ability of mainstream government and kind of mainstream society to sort of like quote-unquote solve this problem, more and more of them are going to take matters into their own hands.
And I did have some people kind of asking me that question over the last couple of weeks.
So I do, you know, basically what you're seeing is, I think what we're going to see is more people moving away from that kind of mainstreamer position and moving into this sort of vanguardist, violent, terrorist position.
Okay, well that's not only depressing, it also stepped on my segue, which was going to be, speaking of YouTube, shall we move on to our topic for this week?
We probably should.
I apologize.
I stepped on your Sigu.
I apologize.
Oh yeah, you stepped on my Sigu, yeah.
I was forgetting another piece of Swiftian satire from the enormously brained gentleman of the far right.
Yeah, and our topic in this episode 14 is going to be the red pill and YouTube, isn't it?
Yes.
YouTube and the red pill, yes.
YouTube and the red pill.
Red pill and YouTube.
So yeah, tell me about all that stuff.
I'm making no effort this week.
There's no effort needed.
This is, you know, we're...
So, so...
Oh, God.
I'm just going to say, next week's episode, we're going to delve more deeply into a very particular person who's prominent on YouTube.
YouTube.
And that will be the high-effort version of this.
Next week we are going to cover, and we've had this requested, and I'm gritting my teeth at it, we're going to do Stefan Molyneux next week.
Oh, here it comes!
If this week feels a little bit lighter, or a little bit, you know, we try to alternate the fun ones and the awful ones, this is the fun one, as far as systems go.
This is the fun one, yes.
I'm just talking about... I just predicted an increase in the amount of terrorism we're going to see because, like, you know, the far right has given up hope that the state is going to do the violence for them.
This is the light version.
Yep.
This is the calm before the storm, as they say.
It is.
So, what I wanted to do this week is to talk a little bit about this concept of the red pill.
And where it comes from and what it means and in particular what it means for the people on the far right and because I think it's something like I do sort of talk to people who are, you know, sort of following this, who are kind of in either law enforcement or have some kind of background in combating counter-terrorism and such, and they just really kind of don't get this concept.
And I have people that I know who are very prominent anti-fascist activists who have just refused to learn what the red pill means.
This person, I just... Serious people, you know, it's beneath them.
Come on.
They shouldn't have to dirty their brains with crap like this.
I don't disagree, but this is a person that I respect very much who just has chosen not to ever learn it.
And so this person, if they do listen to this episode, I apologize.
You are now going to learn what the Redfield means.
Unless you skip over the next few minutes or whatever.
I'll put a timecode in, you can skip to this bit and then you'll never have to know.
So the Red Pill concept, it does come from The Matrix, which is now a classic film, because you and I are old men.
And I did link to the scene if you need to see it, but it does come from the Matrix and the idea is... Obscure scene in the little known... I'm just going to describe it.
I assume that there's like one person listening who has not seen the Matrix and doesn't kind of know what it is.
So the idea is, you know, Morpheus, Lord Fishburne is bringing Neo, Keanu Reeves out of the Matrix.
And he gives them sort of the option.
You can take the red pill or the blue pill.
In the red pill, you take the pill, and then you're gonna come out of the Matrix, and it's going to be kind of unpleasant, but you get to see what the real world is.
And at the blue pill, you kind of forget everything that I've shown you already, and you get to go back and kind of live your blissful life in, you know, the Matrix.
But everything is false, and you're ultimately just being fed upon as a battery or whatever.
I think what's useful in terms of kind of thinking about this, and there are kind of multiple different kinds of pills, there are lots of different colors that seem confusing if you kind of don't get it in context, and I'll kind of get to that in a second, but the idea with the red pill is that it sort of parallels this idea of becoming woke, of kind of wokeness as we described on the left, whereas
Wokeness is this sort of general idea of as you begin to understand the systems of oppression in your world You are aware of sort of the like hidden connections these sort of like the strings that people are kind of moving on and you're aware of the ways in which you yourself are being oppressed or the ways that you are oppressing people and it is this sort of like process of Coming to kind of greater and greater
Knowledge of the world around you and the red pill is sort of this like vulgarized right-wing version of that It does have different contexts in different kind of communities in the far, right?
it seems to have originally come from the Manosphere and this kind of like overtly right-wing misogynist community and The original Red Pill was, you know, like, oh, the gynocracy, i.e., like, female supremacy is actually oppressing you, and, you know, they say there's a patriarchy, but really you are being oppressed by the gynocracy, or whatever.
Yeah, it's a manosphere thing, originally, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, from my understanding, it comes from that.
Certainly the context in which I first heard of it.
Yeah, definitely me as well, you know, and it kind of comes from this idea of like game.
This this kind of idea that like game theory, not in the sort of like mathematical sense, but in the sense of like, you know, you have to know how to approach women.
In order to spread your seed more widely and that those same techniques are the ones that are used in terms of sort of navigating your life and so a lot of the language that the kind of the far right the alt right uses.
Um, kind of come out of this kind of basic concept of the Manosphere, like maintaining frame is kind of one of these things and what that means is, you know, sort of like framing your issues in a way that will kind of make you look good as opposed to kind of bowing to sort of the premises that the cucks and the weaklings or the women or whatever are going to force you to try to accept.
You see that a lot on the far right.
You see that a lot on the alt-right in this kind of white nationalist community these days.
But the red pill as we sort of see it today, I mean the big one is usually race realism.
That except you know and again, I don't believe in any of this, but I'm just describing it I say this I keep saying this even on this podcast just to sort of like so I can't be taken out of context slightly But you do you just sort of see people kind of accepting the like the reality of race realism for instance that the races are different that some people are sort of genetically smarter than others and that these are Average along the races and these things are genetic and
That this sort of difference between races, for instance, is unpleasant to understand, that it is not sort of something that makes you feel happy to know that, like, black people are genetically inferior to you, but that it's something that you should accept and that we should
build public policy around it and that you know most people are not going to kind of be willing to accept this fact for themselves are not going to be willing to accept this kind of this reality that most people it's too unpleasant for most people and so there is this sense that what you're doing when you're kind of taking the red pill is you're taking this kind of unpleasant truth
And you're not only kind of making better decisions or sort of seeing the world more clearly, but that you're becoming more badass and more masculine and more... You know, you're becoming a better person by doing it, right?
Yeah, you're growing up.
You're becoming the adult that stares reality in the face.
And this kind of feeds into a little bit this NPC meme that has kind of gone away.
to a certain degree, and you still kind of see it occasionally.
But for a while, this sort of non-player character NPC meme was kind of all over the place.
And that literally kind of fed into this idea that people who are not red-pilled literally did not have an internal monologue as human beings.
And this kind of plays up to this idea that, you know, talking to people about day-to-day lives, that people are interested in sports, or movies, or people are interested in hobbies, or things that are going on at work, or the weather, or whatever, that because these people are not explicitly talking about declining birth rates and the end of the white race,
And, uh, you know, the inferiority of black people and, like, the differences between the sexes, and there are only two sexes and only two genders, obviously.
Um, the fact that people are not, um, devoted to this 24 hours a day and the fact that people have other interests and hobbies and are not necessarily interested in talking to you about your, uh, horrifying racist phrenology beliefs and the, uh, shapes of skulls, uh, means that they literally are not, like, able to commun- like, they literally don't have
Internal running monologue that they are just sort of like following like a script that is fed to them by the larger society which They're the background characters in the matrix.
They're Literally like computer sprites.
Yeah, I got it and so and so there's this idea that like by taking the red pill by going against a sort of programming of Society that you are becoming more fully human and more fully kind of part of the white race, etc., etc.
Those being the same things.
Exactly.
And these things are usually not expressed in so many words.
It's usually kind of more implicit.
It's very impressive.
There's also, you sort of see people say like, well, red pill me on, you know, some subject.
So, you know, as you, you know, it's not sort of like one moment where suddenly you're red pilled and awake.
It's this thing of, Well, red pill me on Israel or red pill me on, you know, and it's always like finding those hidden connections, finding, you know, oh, the Jews are ultimately behind the banks and the Jews are behind the Olympics.
And, you know, it turns out that white people really did invent rock and roll.
And, you know, there's there's always this thing.
And, you know, like any topic, there's always like, oh, red pill me on that.
And then as the term red pill started to be sort of Scrutinized by online forums they started to kind of using different terms And so they started using like red list or red roof which red roof seems to come from there's a there's a chain of hotels in the u.s.
Called red roof n and I think it's just sort of a pun on that like a red roof beyond that like they'll use names of brands that are like more difficult to to suppress Oh, I see.
Oh, isn't that telling?
They can cloak their racist bullshit using brand names as code words, knowing that, you know, the brand names of a commodity is the last thing that anybody's gonna... We can't censor that.
generic names or names of brands in place of overtly kind of racist words.
Well, isn't that telling?
They can cloak their racist bullshit using brand names as code words, knowing that, you know, the brand names of a commodity is the last thing that anybody's going to...
We can't censor that.
We can't take that off.
Well, exactly.
And I mean, you know, for instance, I mean, this is an aside, but you know, instead of using the N-word, they'll say, you know, Googles.
And this is, this is to some degree, like, they don't do this as much anymore.
I mean, this is kind of more like kind of 2016, 2017 era.
But you know, so like, we should hang out the Googles from trees, for instance, as opposed to the N-word.
And in place of the slur against Jewish people, They'll use kayak because that's the name of a, you know, a travel website, you know.
So, you know, we've got to gas all the kayaks, for instance.
And then there are a whole bunch of other ones that they would use.
So, and this is one of the ways that they will kind of like maintain their presence on these sites is like they will say the exact thing that they mean, except they will use some like jokey word in place of the actual slur.
And it passes muster at, you know, some person doing content moderation who has 15 seconds to look at it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, it's insidious, isn't it?
I mean, it's... And they're constantly shifting.
So as these moderators learn the words, they just shift to something else.
Yeah.
So if you've been tracking it for a while, Like someone like me who's been tracking for a couple of years, I can figure out how long someone's been in the movement just by knowing which code words for slurs they use.
Yeah.
Yeah, like tree rings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's very dependent on all of these people being very, very online, isn't it?
Oh, no.
Well, and that's part of the thing that sort of feeds into this is...
I mean, we'll get into this in a second, but so much of what we think of as the alt-right, this sort of online subculture, is this perpetually online, never-stop posting, you only hang out with people who are in this world unless you're kind of trolling the normies or whatever kind of thing.
When people do leave it it tends to come from just not posting anymore for a while You know and suddenly they sort of wake up for some reason to go.
Oh my god I've spent like you know so many hours on this I mean I Can say I track as much of it as I can and I literally don't have enough hours in the day I mean I've said this before on this podcast is I I mean, there's just literally too much content.
If I did nothing else but consume this stuff as fast as I could possibly consume it, I literally would not have enough waking hours.
Even if I didn't have to sleep, I literally could not do it all.
There's just too much that's produced.
They do four-hour live streams that are honking noises over Mike Pence talking into a microphone.
To even begin to approach it all, no single person could possibly do it.
The fans of this stuff just have this constant onslaught of new material always, by definition.
That's part of the way this stuff works.
You're just always involved.
The sheer immersion.
The immersiveness of it.
of people who are like dancing you but also supporting you who are who are sort of your buddies who are just sort of like who who agree with all your bullshit and who will like validate that by just being there yeah as you say it's part of how it works the the sheer immersion the immersiveness of it yeah to uh people who i suppose are uh you know pretty alienated and uh yeah i was gonna say it it's incredibly insidious because the whole thing relies upon
well i mean there are unpleasant truths about the world that people So, Need to face up to you know i mean there's there's some that are more debatable but you know very big one very urgent one is climate change that is a very big urgent and frightening.
Upsetting red pill that we need to swallow as a culture you know but well no but the real red pill on climate change i mean you know because all these are right wing douchebags i mean is that ultimately it's just a lie meant to you know sort of crush.
you know, the family and like white innovation and some out like trying to reduce white birth rates by convincing people in quote-unquote white countries slash the industrialized world slash the global north Into having fewer children so that we can then be overtaken by mud people like that's you know That's that's being red-pilled on climate change for us.
Sure But as I said, it's why it's so insidious because they take a world with very real problems that do need to be faced up to and they They turn it into this this fantasy world where you know everything is.
Artificially reduced down to the static reified categories you know it's all about race and it's all about.
Gender and all this stuff and it it stops being a it stops being real it's it's the process i mean this is what the red pill is it i watch the the cassie j movie the red pill and it's like.
The entire i mean the movie is is her sort of repetition of like the mrs version of the scientology personality test you know that the soft stuff that they use on you to start with to get you in.
And I don't know whether she's being cynical or whether she's really taken in.
I don't know what's going on there, but she sort of repeats there.
There, um, the thin end of the wedge for you, you know, in this movie, and it's all about taking because Cassie J kind of approached it as a, like, like she was this sort of feminist figure who was like, well, she says, but, you know, from what I understand, she was at least sort of like, at least vaguely known as someone who, you know, was not the sort of like far right figure to begin with.
No, but she can't have been a very thoughtful or particularly well-versed feminist because they come up with stuff that anybody that's actually done the reading should be able to knock down straight away and it takes her in.
Right, well, Lacey Greene is another one who did that.
This was kind of heartbreaking because I was kind of a fan of Lacey Greene.
I kind of had problems with her, but also she was so attacked by this sort of manosphere, MRA, MGTOW.
Yeah, they hated her.
They hated her obsessively like to the degree that you know kevin logan's descent to banister had the occasional bit about you know lacy green to where they just they they hated her like with a passion.
And suddenly she just should take a few months off and came back and she had cut her hair and someone was like.
Yeah, I'm kind of taking the red pill, guys.
And, you know, I've kind of read some people who kind of said, yeah, there were clues to like, she was kind of like, not necessarily 100% on board with trans people, etc.
And, you know, I completely believe that, you know, I mean, you know, I kind of think like, oh, it's like kind of white feminism.
And, you know, she just, yeah.
Never really had the theoretical grounding.
She was kind of speaking, you know, she was kind of like parroting stuff back to a certain degree.
But it also came when she was like dating this guy Chris Regan, who's a kind of a prominent YouTuber in it.
And it seemed to just kind of come with that, where she was like dating this guy and suddenly she changed her beliefs.
And like, it's just bizarre.
I mean, you know, like, I really felt awful when that happened because I thought better of her than that, you know, but, you know.
I was wrong.
Yeah, absolutely.
But whatever the reason, I mean, in the case of Cassie J, whatever's actually going on there in terms of her personally, she repeats their talking points, and their talking points consist of their bullshit spin on very real social problems.
You know, I mean, you can look upon the entire Manosphere MRA thing as like this completely wrong-headed Exactly.
to genuine problems i mean in a sense it's it's actually a completely wrong-headed response to the problems caused for men by patriarchy you know exactly and certainly in that sort of manosphere space yeah absolutely yeah and what they do is they take very real social problems as i say like you know the fact that the family court system is fucked up and and various things and they they they turn it into these ridiculous um uh expert
you know pseudo explanations for these problems that are all just about you know women are women are women are Worse than men.
Women are bad.
Women are evil.
Feminism's cancer.
Feminism's lying to you.
Nonsense like that.
But that's what's happening.
The point I'm making is that these movements always feed on real problems to some extent.
Right.
And there's definitely a place where I'm going to go here in a second.
The whole movement is, in many ways, a response to very real things that are happening in people's lives whether you know they are as serious as these guys think they are or not but like usually it does come from some uh really the personal or social problem that they're recognizing um and they're given a very easy answer to and that easy answer that is you know you're told oh no this is a very difficult thing for you to accept
but ultimately you know if you're a white guy you know an upper middle class and you know and you're told like oh no you didn't get into the college you wanted because you know some black person was promoted above you And this is happening because of, you know, yada yada yada, decreased IQs.
You know, that may be sort of like, you know, unpleasant in the sense of it goes against what you believe is reality, i.e.
reality.
But, you know, it's definitely sort of comforting in that it sort of absolves you of any kind of, like, real, you know, needing to sort of account for yourself in this situation.
And, like, in terms of, like, sort of college admissions and that sort of thing, like, you know, everybody should get to have all the education they want to.
I'm a socialist.
I completely believe that, you know, we shouldn't have elite universities, that, like, every university should be, Wonderful in that people should not be kind of chosen.
You know, we shouldn't have that kind of like hierarchical system ultimately.
You know, that's just kind of fundamentally against my like basic beliefs about the way the world should work.
But, you know, you did not get into that university because, you know, some black person with a lower IQ was, you know, kind of given your spot because the Jews made it happen or whatever, you know.
No, no, you didn't get your spot because the system is fucked up.
Right.
The system is fundamentally unfair to everyone, not just you.
Yeah, that's right.
But of course, because they're semi privileged within the system, they take their misfortunes as cosmic injustices.
So you're very, very often they're getting very much the soft version of the social problem.
But of course, they react to it in a disproportionate way.
Yeah, so there's this video that I really do hope everyone watches.
It's only a few minutes long.
It's an animation.
There are no words in it, so you can watch it without hurting other people's ears.
Some of the visuals are pretty awful.
But it is, it was, I originally found it, believe it or not, I found it in a Doctor Who group back in the day.
One of the Doctor Who Facebook groups got taken over by a Nazi, which I think some of our listeners may recognize that group and name that person.
Anybody who says the Sixth Doctor is their favorite doctor, you should look at them with, you know, Some degree of skepticism, but this person did end up just kind of going full on let's make Holocaust jokes Nazi and posted this video in a Facebook group about Doctor Who at some point and it is called Take Back Our Future.
And, uh, you know, if you watch it now, I haven't seen this shared that widely.
Like, I don't know how popular it is.
I mean, it gets some views.
I mean, if you kind of look at it, it's been shared.
You know, it's been re-uploaded in a bunch of different places.
But I don't see people kind of, like, talking about it all that much.
Maybe I just don't kind of exist in those spaces where it is shared a lot.
But it reflects very clearly my understanding of the idea behind the red pill.
And if you watch this animation, it's sort of like this...
Kid, kind of sitting in the dark, kind of watching stuff on his computer with, like, dirty tissues around him.
Watching a video on his computer, and then you see a red pill appear in his eye, where he's being red-pilled on stuff.
He goes to school, he runs across some really good-looking Nazi guys, like guys with little swastikas on them, who are the kind of Aryan ideal who look a lot like Duke Nukem.
And they go around and kind of throw you know and kind of visibly queer people back in the closet and notably kind of not doing like overt like sort of like violence but you know throwing people in the closet and just sort of like making people change their clothes and just sort of like enforcing quote-unquote order on people and then suddenly they you know you kind of get like a little like wipe and they turn into like kind of good Christians like they just sort of look
Nice and presentable and middle class again, and then you see You know this group of protesters who are being loud and noisy and our kind of big Nazi Duke Nukem guy Rips off a mask and instead of it being like a regular person.
It's a very stereotypical Jew.
And, you know, he slaps on the sign on the, you know, open borders.
He puts on for Israel on the thing.
And then kind of later on, it's like they go and they start like demolishing mosques and putting up churches and that sort of thing.
And the video ends with, you know, a very happy family in the backyard.
Instead of this kid kind of sitting in his, you know, in his semen encrusted Kleenex, they're barbecuing burgers in the backyard as if it's 1953.
And we all are, you know, kind of upper middle class and driving a Buick again.
Classic hero's journey.
Exactly.
I was going to say, which Disney film is this again?
I say this, and I mean, there's more to the video than that.
I mean, it's kind of this astonishing, you know, like watching it.
It's just, it's, everything is listed right on the surface with this, right?
But I think it... Yeah, it doesn't sound like it's using subtext, particularly.
No, no, there's no, there's no subtext on this.
At one point, you know, the kid, the kind of like scrawny kid, wants to join the Nazis, and he does a fist bump with this Duke Nukem guy.
And then you see the words, no homo, above the top of this fist bump.
Again, just in case you were worried that there might be some kind of subtext there...
No, no, there's no subtext at all.
Oh, thank God.
But I describe it to that detail mostly because this is sort of the narrative that these people sort of, Believe in when you when you kind of listen to them talk about you know kind of you know I was kind of alone.
I kind of had personal problems um there's this video that I linked here and um This is a guy.
This is a youtuber named Faraday speaks, and he's brand new He's kind of got some some followers on on Twitter now.
He's been kind of talking about this, and this is a guy who?
is what they call a former a former white nationalist former alt writer and Um, this is a kid.
He, I mean I say kid, he's in his probably late 20s at this point.
Um, he seems very pleasant.
Uh, it's always difficult when you talk about these guys about whether they're, whether it's legit or not.
Um, you know, time will tell.
He seems like he's kind of trying to kind of do the thing, but it's about this like 36 minute video and he, uh, This is definitely something you can watch at 2x speed and kind of get through it.
But he does describe his sort of process into this world.
Now, Faraday does seem to have sort of stopped...
Uh, he kind of got as far as a Jared Taylor.
Now, Jared Taylor is this, like, far-right, racist douchebag.
Um, but he's also kind of at the far-left wing of the stuff that I've really spent my time on.
So, you know, that is to be noted, is that, you know, Faraday kind of says, yeah, I was kind of more in that alt-right space as opposed to kind of overtly alt-right space.
Although he did seem to sort of support race realism to some degree, which is kind of where I draw the dividing line.
But, anyway, um, he describes, you know, I went to college.
I didn't necessarily do well.
I had some personal problems.
I didn't necessarily get the best grades.
I flunked out of school.
I got depression.
And I spent all my time on the internet.
I spent all my time on YouTube.
And...
YouTube is this, like, great radicalizer of this stuff.
He says, I spent all my time on YouTube.
I was looking for, you know, answers to why I was having these problems and why the world was this way.
And he kind of describes, oh yeah, I was kind of a liberal.
I was progressive.
I was, you know, this kind of guy.
I believe in, you know, Black Lives Matter and all that sort of thing.
And then I found a video The truth about race or the truth about, you know, something and he can't remember exactly what it was.
And it was a Stéphane Molyneux video.
And the second you hear it's a Stéphane Molyneux video, you know how the rest of the story's gonna go.
This is a kid who was having problems, who was looking for answers, who was spending all his time online, who found Stéphane Molyneux, and Molyneux sends him down this rabbit hole of awfulness.
And in fact, this video is called My Descent into the Alt-Right Pipeline.
And he describes the process of like I get I just kind of like I had this really close black friend the whole time and I can't believe he was still friends with me because of all the shit I was saying and I know that there were people who distance themselves from me precisely because of the things that I was starting to believe and you know He describes this process of becoming increasingly radicalized.
And as you fall down this rabbit hole, you get increasingly resistant to people trying to bring you out of it.
Because the whole process of getting into it is that all of these beliefs are being validated.
And he said one of the things that got him out of it was he watched this video with Destiny.
Destiny debating Lauren Southern.
So Destiny is a YouTuber who is You know, we can have our problems with Destiny, but he's a liberal guy, he's a progressive guy, and he actually does go and do debates with alt-right people, and he gets a lot of shit for that.
And I think in some ways, I mean, it's a complicated thing.
I think there's diversity of tactics.
I think he deserves to get a lot of shit for some of the things that he does, and he's definitely a liberal, not a leftist, and he sort of fails in a lot of the ways that liberals fail to really combat this stuff.
I think we'll come back to that in a minute.
Um, but just kind of having someone who could give, like, basic talking points to Lauren Southern and, like, wipe the floor with Lauren Southern was a big step in this guy's, you know, kind of coming out of it.
And he said later on he found this video by ContraPoints, and ContraPoints was actually dealing with the talking points and actually, you know, sort of not dismissing it out of hand, but taking it seriously enough to feel like these talking points are worth debunking.
And he said that the thing that really made him leave and decide to start making videos was the Christchurch Massacre.
And he actually breaks down in tears while he's talking about this.
This guy went into this mosque and started blowing people away.
Saying the exact same things that this guy Faraday was saying.
Saying the exact same memes and sharing all the stuff that he had believed.
And that that was the thing that kind of made him just wake up and realize no this stuff is like really really this isn't just me kind of like experimenting with ideas this has like kind of real effects on the real world.
And I think that's a really interesting lesson.
One of the things, I mean, A, this is a very, very standard story.
You hear this over and over and over again.
I mean, I was kind of, I kind of said Stéphane Molyneux and I think you went, oh yeah, well of course.
This is something that's very well known from anybody who's been following this at all is that you sort of like find someone like Stéphane Molyneux or Lauren Southern or Sargon of Akkad.
There's so many of them.
So many of these sort of alt-right figures are classical liberal figures, and we're going to be covering a lot of this as we move forward.
Richard Spencer himself has referred to some of these people, including Sargon, as great entry points, hasn't he?
Yeah, absolutely.
Sargon, he's described Stéphane Molyneux, Lauren Southern, I think he would call Gerard Taylor.
Gavin McInnes, definitely.
Even Milo, back when Milo was kind of more of a thing.
He's kind of described these figures as absolutely great entry points for this.
So much of what happens is people sort of find a figure.
These are kind of like right-leaning guys, guys who sort of grew up in Fox News families, mostly.
I mean, think about...
They're starting from a particular place.
They're starting from a place.
I mean, think about if you're, you know, I'm, I'm 39 years old, right?
But if you're 25 years old and you're sort of a, a white kid who grew up in the Midwest and kind of a conservative suburb or kind of rural town somewhere in the Midwest or the South or, you know, you know, the West or whatever.
If you're 25 years old, if you were born in 1994, 9-11 happened when you were 7.
were born in 1994 you know 9 11 happened when you were seven your entire like memory might be the united states has been at war in the middle east with no particular like change in uh policy with no particular kind of goal in sight Yeah, and then you come of age, you get into young adulthood with everything sucking as much as it does still.
You would have been 14 or so when the financial crisis happened, so like your teenage years, so you probably had a really hard time getting You know, I was 17, I was bagging groceries, you might not even be able to get that job.
Yeah, and this is during the era of Obama.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you may not even remember a president other than, you know, you probably have vague memories of, you know, of George W. Bush, like, when you were a kid.
But, you know, if you were 14 in 2008, that may be the first, like, president you really remember, right?
Yeah, so you're growing up with all this, the world sucking as hard as it does, and as far as you're concerned, you know, There's nothing to be had from liberalism or the left, because as far as you know, liberalism and the left is entirely contained within the Democratic Party, and Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and stuff like that, and they're in power during your adolescence and young adulthood, and they're no better, at least no better.
Right.
Well, and you've got Fox News, and they're going to do a whole We're definitely going to have to do an episode on sort of the larger media environment, sort of the history of Fox and the history of this sort of right-wing noise machine, which for all that we, that you and I as leftists, will have issues with the mainstream press, with the liberal press, with the corporate press, it is a different beast than the, you know, actually like screaming racism and xenophobia down your throat.
Right-wing press in the United States, you know, that Fox News and Newsmax and Walnut Daily and, you know, all these things are, you know, this kind of, like, explicitly partisan press that pretends to be fair and balanced.
That's another, like, really important factor here is that figures like YouTube figures like Rubin.
What's his name?
Dave Rubin.
Or, you know, doing interviews, or, you know, Joe Rogan, where they sit and they will talk to people and say, oh no, I just want to hear, like, all the different viewpoints.
But when's the last time one of these guys ever brought, like, a communist, you know?
When's the last time a socialist was on one of these shows, you know?
We believe in, you know, talking to all sides of the spectrum.
Everyone, you know, from the far left wing, Hillary Clinton, Yeah.
all the way up to overt Nazis.
You know, those, those, that's the, that's the level of, you know, that Rachel Maddow is sort of beyond the pale leftist, you know, whereas I think she's like vaguely left of center, maybe, you know, but the idea that, you know, you're going to bring on an actual, you know, someone who could, who could sort of defend, you know, you know, a real kind who could sort of defend, you know, you know, a real kind of robust Marxism, you know, or a real robust communism or, you know, some vision of anarchism, Just social, just, you know, full-blooded social democracy would be something, you know.
Certainly, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, maybe in this sort of era with, like, AOC, you're starting to get a little bit of that, but you really don't even see that on these channels.
I mean, it's just, it's just beyond the pale.
It's just not even worth considering, and that changes the entire, um, Sort of the spectrum of the debate that changes everything because suddenly I mean just so range of the thinkable.
We're recording this on Sunday, April 7th, and just on, uh, I think Friday night, the Friday right before this, there was a, uh, debate between, and I'm gonna... Believe it or not.
So this guy, um... Sorry, I've got it right here.
It's on this channel, TrainwrecksTV, which I'd never heard of before, but, um, Destiny, who we mentioned before, who's this kind of liberal, uh, debate, kind of blog, like, uh, video game blogger, You know, vlogger who has kind of debated far-right figures before.
So it's this guy Destiny, Nick Fuentes, who we've discussed before, Sargon of Akkad, and this guy Hassan, who... Hassan actually seems to be a leftist.
I mean, I'm not familiar with him, but I'm definitely gonna have to check out his channel.
He seems... he's pretty much on top of things.
He seems to be someone who's kind of willing to actually go for leftist spaces.
But it's Destiny, Nick Fuentes, Hassan, and Sargon of Akkad, and this thing, it says TrainwrecksTV, and this is a fucking trainwreck.
I did, it's four hours long, I got like three hours into it, and just, I couldn't take it anymore.
It's just insufferably bad.
I've seen a, I've seen a clip of that where Sargon says, oh yes, I'll defend fascists, I'll defend anybody, I'll defend you when they come for you, when he's talking to, uh, I can't remember who he's talking to.
Right.
He's probably talking to Hassan at that moment.
I think that was like after I just kind of stopped listening to it.
It was just, you know, I got to the point where I was listening to like a minute or two at a time and just realized, okay, I just need to like move away from this.
But the... Hassan likes to pose as like this, you know, Voltarian champion of free speech who's, who's not, neither left nor right, you know, despite the fact that he's been boosting right, the right for fucking years now.
Right, I mean he kind of calls himself a centrist, but like he's sort of actively against any kind of like left-wing figure.
And I mean, you know, for instance, they were talking about the Christchurch Massacre.
He's a member of UKIP, you know, fuck off.
Right.
I did put, I don't know that we have to discuss them, but I put a couple of videos, a couple of like Sargon rebuttal videos from a while back.
In the show notes.
Sargon has been... We're not doing a full Sargon episode mostly because other people have done this work for me and I just don't feel the need to do it.
But I've linked to a Sean video and a Hbomberguy video.
These are definitely worth watching if you have not seen them before.
My favorite bit is when someone makes a 30 minute video debunking something that Sargon said in one of his two hour live streams.
And Sargon's response is, if it's more than five minutes, I don't have time to watch that.
And so now five minutes is considered a Sargon unit.
One Sargon.
One Sargon is five minutes.
So this podcast is something like 20 Sargons.
No, I mean, when somebody makes a video about, you know, a study, And they actually choose to try to debunk what somebody else said about the study by looking at the wrong study but that just you know from then on that person isn't worthy of consideration.
You don't need to address them anymore they have shown themselves to be not worthy of consideration.
Owen Sargon puts up a screenshot of the study.
scrolls down, is talking about the study, and misses the fact that on screen, while he's doing this, is something that debunks the thing he's saying about the study.
Yeah.
Which is something that, you know, this has happened multiple times by people who have examined Sargon's methodology.
He doesn't really have a methodology beyond just spewing nonsense.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But he comes on and he gets to be this sort of centrist figure, you know?
And this guy who's going to, you know, kind of take the moderate middle ground between, you know, like genocidal racists.
I mean, he literally is like, he goes, he chats with millennial woes.
Millennial woes is like pro-slavery.
You know, like thinking this is like your buddy.
But, um, you know, and I'm not trying to necessarily, like, pick on Sargon here, although he's worth picking on, as much as I'm trying to say, like, the pattern of the way that this stuff happens on YouTube, that this sort of subculture of, like, people sort of getting
That these ideas of sort of overt white nationalism, or this covert white nationalism, being part of the conversation pushes the entire spectrum of what we have to have a conversation about further and further to the right.
And so even if we don't end up in overt ethnostates, it makes concentration camps with brown people in El Paso More likely.
And this is infecting the brains of young people who have not sort of had the life experience, have not had the education to understand how toxic it is, to understand why this is wrong yet.
And if they get into them early enough, It's really, really dangerous.
There's a link I've got here in the show notes, and this is an interview from the YouTube product chief.
Sorry, can I interrupt you there for a second?
Just let me be clear.
You're saying there is no rabbit hole effect on YouTube?
people just sort of watch one video and then they kind of get more and more extreme and they just kind of like it keeps recommending more and more extreme stuff.
And so there's kind of a back and forth where this guy is sort of denying that this rabbit hole effect exists.
So question.
Sorry, can I interrupt you there for a second?
Just let me be clear.
You're saying there is no rabbit hole effect on YouTube.
Answer.
What I'm saying is that when a video is watched, you will see a number of videos that are then recommended.
Some of those videos might have the perception of skewing in one direction or, you know, call it more extreme.
There are other videos that skew in the opposite direction.
And again, our systems are not doing this because that's not a signal that feeds into the recommendations.
That's just the observation you see in the panel.
I'm not saying that a user couldn't click on one of those videos that are quote-unquote more extreme, consume that, and then get another set of recommendations and sort of keep moving in one path or the other.
All I'm saying is, it's not inevitable.
It's not inevitable.
That's YouTube's official response to this.
Yeah.
Now... Well, that's essentially just putting the own... you know, it's just the... well, you don't have to click it.
You know, and I mean, look, we've...
i've seen in my own youtube recommendations just be an informed consumer yeah i mean sure we're like hosting this like far right bullshit uh all over our channel but you know we're not moderating content at all i mean you know we're just like letting people do holocaust style and uh you know people you know it's up to you you can you can make up your own mind um and we're just gonna like feed you stuff that uh you know is more like the stuff you've already seen and so
So, like, there is this process where, I mean, it's just, it's sort of obvious by anybody who's, like, been on YouTube and started looking into this stuff.
I mean, you know.
We're gonna actively avoid taking down, you know, far-right videos.
We're gonna design our algorithm to funnel you more and more extreme stuff.
But ultimately, we're not actually holding a gun to your head making you click the next video, so we have no responsibility here.
Right.
And they say, like, there's, like, the more extreme is not something that, like, feeds into our recommendations.
But, I mean, ultimately, there's just this sort of way in that YouTube is, like, feeding, like, this desire for constant engagement.
And this is something that, like, social media does in general.
This desire for, to sort of make people more and more engaged.
To keep, to never stop scrolling, to never stop watching, to never stop posting, is going to lead people into more and more, you know, you're always looking for that thing that's more eye-catching.
Oh, like, that sounds like an interesting thing, and then you just kind of move further and further into that.
And, I mean, part of the issue is that there's just not, like, you know, there's not sort of a far-left version of this, you know, like, there aren't, you know, at least I have not seen, you know, some YouTube algorithm that's sort of like pushing people towards Stalin.
You know what I mean?
Like, not that Stalin, I mean, Stalin is not left wing in the sense that you and I would understand it, but, you know, I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing, there's not a community pushing in that direction.
But, you know, taking, because he's such a huge elephant in the room, taking Stalin out of it completely for the moment.
Right.
You know, it wouldn't work.
Because they claim, of course, that the red pill, their stuff, is like the difficult truths about the world that you have to face if you're a hard, masculine grown-up.
It's the opposite is the case.
The stuff they peddle is easy.
It's sugary.
It gives you a dopamine hit.
Which is why it fits so well with social media, because social media is designed to keep feeding you the little hits of dopamine, so you keep coming back.
The actual truths about the world, like I was saying, like climate change, I mean, there are really great YouTubers that talk about this, Potholer, I can't remember the number, but it's Potholer something, and he's a terrific YouTuber, and his videos are amazing, but they're depressing!
Because the world is fucked you know and they don't have like clickbaity you know screenshots is the click on you know you won't believe what we found out about you know the sea level rise or whatever you know it's not it doesn't feed into that same sense of like agreement.
Exactly it doesn't give you what you want to hear it gives you stuff you don't want to hear you know if you're one of these guys you want to hear that you know it none of it's your fault.
That it's, you know, you didn't get in college because there was some black person that got it unfairly.
You're the victim.
It's somebody else who's treating, who's treating you poorly, you know, and there's nothing you can do about it.
You're not called upon to do anything about it, but you can sit there and feel aggrieved and complain.
That's, that's fun.
That's good.
That's the dopamine hit that social media is trying to serve you up.
You know, the videos that talk about systemic problems with educational systems in capitalist society, they don't provide the dopamine hit.
Right, and those are like complicated and nuanced.
I mean, that's, you know, we've got to talk about this kind of like detailed history of oppression and this detailed history of like the way that the capitalist system has like deprogrammed, you know, kind of programmed people.
And, you know, there's often, there often isn't like an easy villain.
- No, it's a systemic thing. - It's a systemic thing or that it's just, you know, like there are many actors that have done like complicated things and you know, this is a long story that takes a lot of time to really explain and it's not gonna be something that you can fit into like a four minute clickbait thing, you know? - No, exactly, yeah.
And left wing politics is always ultimately geared towards activity because it's about it's about people getting active and taking control of their if it's meaningful.
It's about people getting active and taking control of their own lives and trying to influence politics themselves, getting organized, getting unionized, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's a call to actually get up and do something.
Right.
Absolutely.
And so you know you can't just do that you know it's seventeen years old in your basement wearing boxer shorts right now what you want to do is.
What you want to do is sit and watch watch another video so it's it's structurally disposed towards funneling you the right wing stuff right.
And I mean obviously there's a sort of criticism of collectivism, or Twitter activism, and dunking people on Twitter, and that's something that crosses the political spectrum to a certain degree.
None of what I'm saying should be construed as me saying the left is perfect.
Far from it, believe me.
Or even the people on this podcast are not beholden to that.
I spend way too much time on Twitter, although most of that is research at this point.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, but there is a difference between, you know, left-wing answers are legitimately difficult and legitimately, like, asking people to challenge their assumptions.
And this is why, I mean, this is one reason, not certainly the only reason, but one reason why the left really doesn't have a place in the media ecosystem, because it is Difficult to fit a real leftist critique into you know a five minute, you know segment or whatever Of course, the other reason is that you know, it's actively against the sort of corporate media structure and like, you know Western imperialism, etc Which is a more important factor.
I think there's also another in this kind of gets back to I You know, the mention of Destiny and sort of his willingness to kind of go and debate these guys.
Or Natalie Nguyen, who has gotten a lot of shit for debating TERFs and kind of like going on and kind of debating alt-right figures and white nationalist figures.
I think that there is a sense in which, you know, the left kind of says we should not be platforming these beliefs, we should not be giving them a hearing because they're not worth a hearing.
And I don't disagree with that.
But if you're kind of a young guy and you start like you hear about race and IQ and you go and Google it and you get a whole bunch of results on YouTube where it's you know a whole bunch of people who seem like they're kind of clever intelligent people kind of talking about reason and evidence and science with you know like links to academic papers talking about this and then the other side is just kind of people like mocking that as like an even a concept and
It's easy to sort of be misled into thinking that the hereditarian people have a point there, you know?
There's this comic I saw, and I was trying to look it up, but I couldn't find it, but there's a comic, which is, you know...
Uh, you know, some guy, you know, kind of goes up to a Black Lives Matter person and asks, you know, like, so, so tell me about, you know, tell me about, you know, kind of, like, intersectionality.
And it's like, it's not my job to educate you.
You should educate yourself and go Google it.
And then he goes and Googles it and suddenly gets, like, you know, this guy who's, like, feeding him, you know, uh, you know, chronology and race and IQ data and crime statistics and, like, let me talk about all the, you know, the Illuminati and the Jews are in control of everything.
Like, if you Find some right-wing person and you're cured they will feed you all this bullshit like willingly to the to the limits of your ability And I think that on the left there is this sort of sense particularly in sort of social justice spaces that we shouldn't sort of expect People in marginalized communities to have to keep explaining this stuff over and over again and again I completely agree with that and you know I
I don't want to have to sit and explain this, you know, kind of one-on-one level stuff over and over and over again, but The Right is absolutely willing to do that, and that's partly because all they have is the one-on-one level stuff, because the second you do any depth on this, it just kind of disappears immediately.
But I do think that that's something, and this is sort of a criticism of myself, criticism of, you know, we could do a better job at sort of making this stuff It's sort of being available to people who really are kind of asking reasonable questions.
And the problem is that so many people are kind of going out and they're C-lining or they're jacking off, J-A-Q-ing out, just asking questions.
And just sort of asking the stuff in bad faith and sort of reaching out and just trying to waste people's time.
And it's a difficult problem, but online spaces are not, you know, Part of this is kind of structural and algorithmic, and part of it is just sort of a temperamental difference between kind of the left and the right.
And that's part of why I think that some of these websites, some of these sources, which are imperfect but will give sort of a basic explanation for some of this stuff, like Everyday Feminism, for instance.
I have lots of problems with that site.
If you want to know basic what intersectionality is, it's an excellent resource.
I do respect some of that stuff, but here on the left we have this issue of, well, it's imperfect, it's impure, it doesn't hit all the notes, it's got some issues, etc.
It becomes a difficult problem, ultimately.
It's it's kind of a it's kind of something that's that's our curse because you know left wing politics is an attempt to grapple with the complex reality in in good faith.
And that's necessarily involves all sorts of complexity and when you have complexity of argument and complexity of opinion you can have lots of shades of opinion and you gonna have this thing where people look at somebody else who you know to the outside observers.
Indistinguishable and they're going to say, well, you said this, that and the other.
And again, the outside observer sees no difference between the two statements, but they're going to, they're going to be furious about it because the difference in emphasis, you know, when you're that far deep into it, it changes the entire meaning of what's being said.
And there's a serious, you know, there are serious, because the whole idea is that Action follows from understanding so if you understand wrongly then you can take the wrong action and this is it yeah i mean there's an awful lot of pettiness and assholishness and just you know sniping and dogmatism absolutely but there is kind of a. There is a need to argue over the fine details i would say and sometimes it paralyzes us.
I'm not I'm not disagree.
I mean, I think that and I know that, you know, you don't need me to tell you, we should, you know, we could do better at this, you know, this is not me kind of speaking to the left and, you know, saying you guys need to do better.
I mean, you know, we all kind of have this problem.
And people are definitely aware of this sort of issue.
But to the degree that people are being radicalized by these kind of far right figures, and to the degree that they're not seeing a Yeah, a counterbalance in those spaces.
That is certainly one of the things that is pushing people further, right?
And so while I think, you know, I think Destiny, you know, in many ways, I think he does a pretty good job on some issues.
I think he gets lost in the details of stuff.
I think he fails to kind of consider systemic issues.
But I think like the fact that he's out there and the fact that he's debating it is at least Something.
I would like him to be better at what he does, but it's difficult to recommend that without being willing to go and do it myself.
You know, I don't know what the answer is.
I do wish that there were more left-wing figures, you know, actual left figures on YouTube who were making content that was sort of directly, like, kind of on these issues and kind of debunking them and doing it in sort of a timely way.
And it's also kind of one of the things where, like, really talented lefty YouTubers tend to put, like, many, many hours into one video or produce, like, one video a month or two.
This is another problem because in many ways it's apples and oranges.
from the right you know they'll produce some of these guys do like three hour videos five days a week yeah you know well this is another problem because in many ways it's apples and oranges you know you if you go into a debate with one of these people as a leftist you're debating somebody who is fundamentally not interested in arguing with you in good faith and who doesn't I mean, we've talked about this before, you know, they can just say whatever bullshit pops into their heads or that they've learned by rote.
You have to do better than that.
So while they can come back at you instantly with whatever pops into their heads, you have to try to remember a hundred different facts.
It can be incredibly difficult just because you're at that kind of immediate disadvantage.
And that's not an excuse.
I'm just saying that there's an imbalance there in I think what I'm saying is I think we do need figures who are, I mean, even making inroads with people who are liberals or progressives, and I know that's a difficult thing to say to leftists, is that like maybe making common cause with liberals is a thing we should be doing.
But, you know, finding points of agreement and kind of like supporting some of these voices who maybe are not completely doctrinally correct and they're not, you know,
I don't entirely disagree with you, but I would say, you know, with the difference between leftism and liberalism is not just sort of degree, it's a fundamentally different thing.
So it's not like liberals are people who are not sufficiently left.
It's, you know, in my opinion, it's an entirely different worldview.
I don't disagree.
I mean I definitely agree with that.
I mean I'm not trying to sort of like oversimplify or to kind of make the vulgar argument.
I don't think that leftism is just liberalism but more so.
In the same way that I don't think that white nationalism is just conservatism but more so.
I think there's a better case for that than the connection between liberalism and leftism.
I don't disagree with that.
Because ultimately what leftism is, is opposition to the fundamental economic order of capitalism.
You know, ultimately liberals, white nationalists, and conservatives are all pro-capitalism, at least in kind of like big picture.
So yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that.
I guess what I'm saying is, you know, when a liberal has sort of a good point to make about like, hey, maybe gay people are human, Support them!
Let's use them when we can.
Exactly.
There just aren't that many leftists out there who are communicating to mainstream audiences in ways that they can understand.
This is something that I brought up before in the conversation that Mike Enoch had with Demotivator Opinion.
I'm not 100% on board with him, but he seems like a perfectly fine guy.
or someone you know i like his twitter feed i've liked his videos he's he's an anarcho-communist he's you know got some good points i i'm not you know i'm not 100% on board of them but he seems like a perfectly fine guy he got like hung up and like trying to describe the basics of anarcho-communism when you're debating with like you know kind of kevin logan i guess is a laborer i don't know would you call him a leftist or probably a social democrat Yeah, I think he calls himself a socialist.
He's that sort of, yeah, Labourite socialist.
Yeah, he's probably to the right of me, but not, you know, like, I don't know, I wouldn't call him a liberal for sure.
But, you know, you're sitting there and you're arguing with, like, a white nationalist, Kevin Logan, and Tim, who's Probably also in that kind of similar space like social democrats somewhere in that in that range and the nitty-gritty of You know Private versus personal property as sort of like the intro to like who you are and what you believe maybe not the like Condescent factor here, you know.
Yeah, and again, this is partly a systemic issue and that like people just don't have a sort of fundamental baseline understanding of this stuff because there's no sort of like larger cultural understanding and
But the reason that there isn't a larger cultural understanding is because there's no source that's kind of going out there and kind of making this accessible to people and I don't know this is much bigger than sort of the question of how do you prevent far-right radicalization, but Increasingly as I've studied this stuff I spent you know almost two and a half years on that I guess two and a half years more than two and a half years at this point of following this like kind of far-right rhetoric and Increasingly where I land on it is that liberalism has no answer to this
And that, you know, we can nibble around the edges, we can sort of, like, try to use, you know, de-radicalization techniques, we can try to use, you know, law enforcement, de-platforming, etc.
to sort of stem the tide, but ultimately we need real left solutions in order to, like, actually kind of combat this at the root.
And, you know... It's more than that liberalism doesn't have the answers.
Liberalism is opposed to the things that are the answers.
Right, right, right.
But liberalism thinks it has the answers and that those answers are like, well, we should all just kind of be nice to each other and don't disagree with that, you know?
A lot of individual liberals are very well-intentioned and very clever people.
Don't get me wrong.
And I do agree with you.
I mean, I'm committed.
I'm personally committed to no platform.
I think it's the right thing.
I think sometimes the left Over simplifies no platform or misunderstands or dogmatize is it i mean it like anything else it is sensitive to context right there is a difference between.
I'm not even making value judgments at this point i'm just i'm just delineating different.
Types of things there's a difference between for instance going on a. You know a right wing platform there's a difference between having a right wing on your platform and then there's a difference between meeting a right wing so to speak in a.
A sort of neutral space like you know like a live stream that's the word on youtube you know where it's not necessarily anybody's particular show anything that another thing of course is the technology has changed these things where.
Our older political concepts like no platform, they were developed before YouTube live streams existed.
Now, what is a YouTube live stream?
What kind of platform is it in this political situation?
And I think maybe we could be a little bit more nuanced and flexible about thinking some of these things through.
And we could also, I mean, let's be honest, we could also do a little bit less anathematizing of people.
I don't think Glenn Greenwald and people like that should go on Tucker Carlson.
I think that's the wrong thing to do, right?
I don't think that's any reason to then say, right, Glenn Greenwald, useless.
Right.
I mean, there may be other... Sorry, I'm not going to get into that, but... There's definitely other things to talk about there, but... You know what I mean.
No, no, no.
I know exactly what you mean.
And, I mean, you definitely see this in sort of, like, online, like, cancelled culture, you know?
Like, oh, so-and-so is cancelled because, you know, like, they... You know what?
Chelsea Manning did, like, an escape room with, you know, some of the Proud Boys, I think, with, like, Gavin McInnes and a couple of other figures like that.
And...
You know, we still don't know exactly what was going on there, but you know, I'm certain, you know, Chelsea, if anybody gets like the benefit of the doubt, it's, you know, I spent seven years being tortured by the US government for like, you know, exposing secrets of the imperial war machine.
Yeah.
And, uh, you know, if anyone sort of should get the benefit of the doubt, it's Chelsea Manning.
But, you know, um, so, you know, that happens and suddenly it's a, you know, there's this, you know, day long, you know, a couple of days of, of, uh, people, you know, like Chelsea Manning is canceled now and not, I do think that there's a space for us, and I mean I do see this in kind of the overly online kind of community, this kind of always posting on Twitter culture, which does not necessarily reference the entire left or whatever.
On the contrary.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's often taken for the entire left, but it's not.
Oh, no, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think we're kind of far afield here and I'm kind of wrapping up here, but.
I think overall, I think the point, you know, kind of where I'm trying to land on this is just to try to, you know, understand how this kind of YouTube radicalization thing works and that while there are, you know, problems at the YouTube level, like at the YouTube corporate level, at the Google, you know, the Alphabet level, That are exacerbating this.
One of the issues is just sort of the way that leftists sort of treat the platform.
And I think we should be having a larger conversation about how we as sort of individuals can work to sort of combat this problem.
And part of that is probably going to mean having to enter into some kind of debate or conversation with some of these unsavory figures on some degree or other.
Part of the work that I'm trying to do is to help people understand how better to do that by understanding the divisions better, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense, yeah.
I think there's a lot more to be said on this issue, but... Oh yeah, no, we should wrap up.
Also, I should note that I know for a fact there are actual Nazis listening to this podcast at this point.
I never really intended this to be for that, you know, for...
I do wonder if it's entirely possible that, like, if someone like Faraday were to listen to this podcast and understand that I have taken these beliefs very, very seriously, and I have clearly, you know, I know these arguments backwards and forwards.
I can debunk them to your heart's content, you know.
I do wonder the degree to which, you know, some fashy dickhead listening to this and listening to me mock them but take them seriously uh might uh help people so i don't know that's just something that has been crossing my mind over the last couple of weeks so um we'll see i guess yes indeed okay so that's uh episode 14 wrapped up uh See you next week for another episode 14, where we will be... No, we're not doing that.
It's going to be episode 15.
We're not doing that?
Oh, I'm disappointed now.
I'm sad now.
But episode 15, I suppose, in which we will be talking about Stéphane Molyneux, which is definitely... that subject is definitely related to this.
I mean... Oh, yeah.
Now, in a lot of ways, that will be sort of an extension and a sort of an instantiation of what we're talking about this week.
Because we didn't really talk about the extent to which the whole red pill thing resembles a cult, you know, in its appeal and its way of arguing and its way of trapping people in and Stefan Molyneux is of course an attempted cult leader and in many ways he, you know, he still works in that way.
But yeah, we'll get on to that next week.
We will, definitely.
Do you want to plug any stuff?
I'm on Twitter at Daniel E. Harper.
Go follow me.
Thank you to all my new Patreon supporters.
I definitely do appreciate it.
I am interested in knowing what people would like to see me do that might be kind of entice people to come on more often.
Send me a message or whatever.
Yep, and I'm on Twitter too, at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore.
Get in touch with me if you've been messaging Daniel and he hasn't replied and you need me to bother him for you.
That would be a good way to get me to respond to you, yes.
Just bother Jack and get Jack to bother me.
That's a good way, yeah.
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